


I Love You (Don't Touch Me)

by ishie



Category: Veep
Genre: Community: trope_bingo, F/M, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Trope Bingo Round 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-07
Updated: 2014-04-07
Packaged: 2018-01-18 11:15:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1426453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishie/pseuds/ishie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Amy didn't just run screaming out of Bumpkinville yesterday.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Love You (Don't Touch Me)

**Author's Note:**

> FIC AMNESTY. Nine billion years ago, Shaunna asked me for fake relationship VEEP fic. Um, ta-da? Kind of? I've been trying for almost two years to put more in this, but. Yeah. It's post-season 1, I tried to get the timelines straight but, uh, what timelines? How much time passes in season 1? A week? A year? I don't know. I couldn't figure it out. Give me Mike's job, is what I'm getting at here. I can't be worse than him! I only need to walk my imaginary dog like twice a week!

The thing is, no one is supposed to actually give a damn about what is or is not—or was, or was not—potentially ever happening inside Amy's uterus. Womb, babymaker, ladygarden; whatever.

Unless she wanted someone to give a damn, obviously, but even then, they weren't supposed to care about it this long. No, this particular clusterfuck is supposed to be done and dead by now. Amy swigged sweaty iced tea from the place eight blocks away without gagging, even though Dan had dosed it with sriracha, and kept smiling every time another of her pea-brained coworkers casually dropped by her office to demonstrate how not completely useless they were to the team. She even teared up a little with the frankly hilarious sob story she fed to Janet, who ate up the overtones of vaguely spiritual nonsense cribbed from half-remembered hangover marathons of _Days of Our Lives_ in college.

In short, Amy swallowed her own sense of personal dignity—nothing new there—to take the heat for Selina, and that was fucking that.

It should have been the smoothest thing she's managed to pull off since she wrangled Selina's way into the President's camp and onto the ticket, but nope. _Nope_. The gods reached down from on high and smacked her right in her stupid smug face one more time, just to show her they could.

Amy didn't just run screaming out of Bumpkinville yesterday. She's been around long enough to recognize that there's one thing that remains constant in Washington. No matter how many times the polls show the political landscape shifting, or how many screaming matches erupt in its illustrious halls, or how many tabloid covers sell, that one thing is: no one actually cares about who anyone's fucking.

Sure, everyone in town loves a good gossip as much as the next living, breathing human being. Sure, sometimes it feels like the real engine of government is who has what dirt on whom, but everyone is so wrapped up in their own ego-pumping shit that no one actually _cares_. Unless who they're fucking (or not fucking) coincides with who they're fucking over, or promising not to fuck over, or planning to fuck with in the next news cycle. When it doesn't _really_ matter to anyone, it's a few days of giddy gossip, maybe not-so-blind items on a couple of blogs, and then it's done and onto the next.

(Until someone splashes dick pics all over Twitter or Gmail and some greasy small-town rag stumbles across the scandal of the year while investigating parking ticket graft. Then, it's everywhere, forever, mostly because it's hilarious and everyone in town believes they're too smart to get caught like that. Until they do.

Honestly, how any of that is still a thing that happens is something Amy will never understand, even with all the up-close-and-personal time she's had with the entire spectrum of entitled shitbrains that slime their way around the Beltway.)

That's not all, though. There's a corollary: everyone especially doesn't give a shit who the women are fucking, unless they're getting paid for it.

How lucky for Amy, then, that somehow she's managed to buck every single one of those unwritten rules. It almost feels like she's walking around with a new season of some trashy reality show between her legs. Because Washington, and all of America for that matter, is goddamned obsessed with what's going on in and around her vagina.

At first it's a minor annoyance. A buzzing mosquito that keeps swooping past her ear. Easily swatted, not so easily ignored, but in the grand scheme of things about as worthy of her attention as, well, Gary.

Until the photo op just a few days later, where Selina's supposed to be announcing the winners of the National Safety Council's Annual Seatbelt Rodeo Champions or whatever the fuck. The one that gets totally derailed by some cotton-brained TMZ reject wondering what the Vice President has to say about her senior staff's personal lives in the wake of what half of the drooling yokels south of Nashville (okay, 63% of the whole damn country, according to Pew) have apparently decided was her "sin baby gettin' called home to the Lord".

Yeah, _that_ one. The one you will definitely see leading most of the nightly news broadcasts, if you're the kind of seventy-year-old housebound asshole who still watches network television. After that cornpone calamity goes totally off the rails and straight into Shitstorm Gulch, all Selina will say to Amy before she cuts her out of every single meeting on the schedule, is, in an icily precise hiss: "You need to shut this down. Right. The fuck. Now."

Amy has never in her life longed to drown herself face-first in a lake of whiskey that's been set on fire, but she is starting to see the appeal.

"Yes, ma'am, I am, it's... I am absolutely shutting it down," she says to the slammed door. "If anyone would _answer their goddamn phone_ —"

She closes her eyes for a second and dreams of putting her fist through the wall, phone and all. No, wait, maybe through Janet's face. And other, possibly treasonous, faces.

"That doesn't look like shutting it down," Mike chimes in, around the huge chunk of doughnut stuck in his cavernous fucking mouth.

It takes away absolutely none of her concentration from scrolling through contacts to tell him, "I will pull your spleen out of your ass with Jonah's massive gorilla hands if you don't shut the fuck up, Mike, I swear to God."

"I'm just saying, it doesn't look like you're shutting it down."

He flinches so hard when she fakes a lunge at him that he spills his coffee all over his shoes and almost chokes to death on the doughnut.

It's the best Amy's felt in _weeks_.

\---

There's one quick and easy solution, so quick and easy it takes her a full hour to even think of it, but Amy will literally throw herself in front of the Acela before she falls on that particular sword.

Still, she pulls her phone out again and dials.

"If you don't call me back within the next twenty minutes, my next call is Meredith Vieira and I'm going to offer to cry about you fucking McCauley in prime time, and, and, and, and how you constantly overcompensate for your tiny shriveled _dick_ , and she's going to jump at the chance because Selina fucked her on national television with some tree lighting bullshit way back in the stone age and she never forgets a goddamn thing. She's an elephant. Nineteen minutes. _Call. Me. Back_."

That should do it.

Maybe she'll throw herself in front of the Circulator instead. Much less messy. Way too many tourists, though.

\---

The worst part is that the miscarriage plan was _so simple_. It was literally the dumbest, fastest, easiest solution to almost everyone's problems—straight from the horse's mouth, even!—and it should have gone over gangbusters. It _would_ have, if any of the brainless monkeys she works with were capable of acting like functioning adults for a hot minute instead of running around with their limp dicks in their hands.

Amy fake-smiled until she wanted to punch herself in the face, and wiped away a few opposite-of-discreet tears, and got ready to pat herself on the back all week. A couple of blinds, an uncomfortable drive-time or five, and the story was dead. _Dead._ Selina could fuck every member of the cabinet every night of the week if she wanted, and no one would bat an eyelash.

But then, of course— _of course_ —Gary opens his big fucking mouth, or Dan cracks a joke about who even knows what, and some intern practically jizzing himself with nerves and coke in the corner of an elevator goes running to the page he wants to nail, who calls her BFF at Justice, who lets something slip to a freshman coed over drinks at the shitty patio bar in Georgetown where the tourist boats belly up to the dock, who calls her ex at the _Washingtonian_....

By the time Amy stands over her kitchen sink later that night—while she's staring down at the slimy dishes she's ready to just throw in a trash bag and heave over the balcony railing—while she's waiting for the microwave to beep so she can bolt down a giant bowl of frozen pasta and whatever hasn't turned into black mold at the back of her fridge—she reaches over to the laptop on the counter and refreshes the blog she's checking to make sure no one is still running with any variations on the Slutty Selina story.

Yeah. They definitely aren't.

Instead, Amy watches as her own face coalesces out of the sharpening pixels. The picture taking up most of the screen on her ridiculously huge and slow-as-fuck laptop is one in which she looks like she's just tried to swim the English Channel in her best suit. Fucking Charleston. Fucking advance teams who didn't get fucking tents for outdoor events in the middle of the fucking monsoon season.

She stares at the picture, still too horrified to do anything else. Her hair hangs in limp, dirty ribbons around her face. Three buttons are missing from the front of her shirt (translucent from the rain! Thank fuck she'd gone so long without doing her laundry that she was wearing the zebra-striped piece of shit bra under it that day, too!). On every side she's surrounded by the usual sausage fest slash clown show that passes for senior staff, all of them looking just as rough as she does. Dan is caught by the camera in the least flattering, eyes-half-closed, slack-jawed, _Neandertal_ -looking expression she's ever seen on a human being. Jesus Christ, it's like Jonah's face got pasted over his and left out in the rain for six months.

The open bottles of wine all of them are clutching are just the icing on the massive shitcake that her life has turned into in the last nine hours or so.

 **OVAL OFFICE ORGY!** the headline screams. God, it's not even fucking _accurate_.

The blog post under it, by comparison, is a goddamn work of art. Who knew Amy was such an irresistible nympho that she literally didn't know who had fathered her poor dead out-of-wedlock child? It's certainly news to Amy! If she weren't the target, she might spend a day or two trying to wheedle the author of it into coming to work on the Vice President's staff. God knows they need that kind of creativity and turn-around.

All of this Amy processes in the second or two it takes for the full scope of the page to sink into her brain before her phone literally blows up with text messages and Voice transcriptions and Twitter replies and Secret notifications and Facebook pokes and call after call after call after call.

As in, literally blows up. As in, she is in the middle of spitting out another ill-advised "no comment, fuckface" when it squawks and burns her hand and starts smoking before she drops it in the half-full sink.

The dishes have been soaking since before they left for, shit, Cleveland? Through the gray film floating on the water, Amy sees the phone light up with one more call before it finally shorts out and she leaps back from the sink with a yelp.

"Right, of course, _now_ you call me back."

\--

It's surprisingly easy to fall asleep that night. The Xanax she definitely doesn't have a prescription for helps a lot. A _lot_.

For the first time in ages, Amy doesn't pass out on the couch clutching her phone. She doesn't roll over in bed and crack her knee on her laptop. And she doesn't wake up to a panicked call from the Vice President, asking where the briefing book on Addis Ababa is, or whether she's really sure no one noticed the audible burp at the state dinner.

Well, okay, her landline does ring once. By the time she's awake enough to really join the conversation, Selina's already moved past the cursing. Mostly.

"Amy, we have been through some _tough_ times together. Tough times. I honestly don't fucking know how I would get through most days without you, but if you don't have this fixed by the time I get on the plane tomorrow afternoon, I am going to strangle you with my goddamn jacket. Capisce?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"I had to stand in cow shit today and dodge questions about your love life, Ames. I shouldn't be dodging questions about _anyone's_ love life, and I certainly shouldn't be doing it standing in _cow shit_!"

"It won't happen again, ma'am. Mike's already taken care of the advance team."

"This was the _new_ advance team? Jesus Christ. Fix it! _All_ of it!"

So, okay, there's the one phone call.

\--

If Sue were writing an autobiography, which she isn't, because all of her non-work time is eaten up by her spin class, her chorale group, and the political fanfic she absolutely does not read or write or forward to Amy when it's especially hilarious, but if she were, the myriad ways in which Dan is so completely fucked to hell and back would take up at least three chapters. Maybe six.

"You know, really, I don't see how anyone could do it justice in less than twenty-thousand words. Forty might even be too few."

It's not that Amy minds the constant enumeration of all the ways in which Dan Egan is hoist by his own dickwad—a phrase that admittedly still needs a little work, but keeps floating through her head, like the bridge of an insipid pop song or Senate Rule 22. It's not even that she minds listening to Sue rattle off anything, given the woman's masterful use of language to paint beautiful pictures of comeuppance and karmic balance and perhaps a stint in a minimum-security federal prison where he'll learn the true meaning of poor decisions.

On any other day, Amy would love to listen to it. She would dig a tape recorder out of storage—an actual physical tape recorder, with ribbons of matte brown plastic and spinning reels—and record it for posterity. But today, Amy's already sat in two overlapping four-hour meetings about appropriations bills she hopes will spontaneously combust the second they're printed. She's wearing a skirt with a huge salad dressing stain next to the crotch. She hasn't been able to check her email in more than twenty minutes and someone went to the not-inconsiderable trouble of filling all her desk drawers with pictures of her face pasted on various porn actresses bodies.

She just wants to know if the Vice President has asked for her—

"No."

—and if anyone knows where the dickweasel's holed up until he can worm his way back into someone's, _anyone's_ , good graces.

"Oh, he's in supply closet 4B-2 in the sub-basement," Gary says, looking up from his bag inventory like he only seconds ago realized anyone else was in the office. He squints across the room like a naked mole rat and holds up a finger. "If you hit the steam pipe trunk distribution venue, you are a-lost, heh."

Sue takes a brief break from hanging up on incoming callers.

"Before you go sharpen your claws on Dan's ridiculous face, I just want to make it clear: if anyone in this office is getting drunk and getting double-teamed by a cadre of incompetent bureaucrats, let alone triple-teamed, it's not you."

"I know."

"I'm not saying who it is, but it's not you."

"I know!" Amy waits for Gary to lose himself in the bag again, if only so there is one less witness if she gets it wrong, which: she won't, because, "It's ... Mike?"

"Amy, please, now you're embarrassing both of us."

\--

Officially, there's only one basement in the building, a warren of mostly windowless offices that stay dark no matter how many fluorescent lights are jammed into the ceilings. And, of course, there's the bowling alley. Amy's been there twice. Once on her initial tour of the EEOB, back when she was just a drudge from the Senator's Baltimore office called up to the big leagues for the first time. The second was on a very ill-advised group date-slash-political clout/dick-measuring contest just a few weeks later, during which, coincidentally, she made the colossal mistake of hooking up with the King of the Shitbirds she's currently trying to find.

Unofficially, apparently, there's a whole second city down here. She wanders through brick hallways and rounded doorways for a good half hour before she starts to see signs of life again. Luckily, none of them are Secret Service agents getting twitchy about how far she's penetrated official White House space. She thinks. It's hard to gauge distance when every twisting corridor looks exactly alike: old as dirt and creepy as hell.

The steam pipe trunk distribution venue, though, is imaginary. Maybe. It's probably Gary's idea of a joke, like the time he tried to convince her the commissary had 3,000 calorie muffins.

She finally finds Dan sitting in a small alcove that pretends at being an office, at a metal desk that's literally overflowing with old briefing books and bound bills. He's carved out just enough space for his laptop and his phone and is staring blankly at a wall on which delicate ribbons of dirt mark old water leaks.

"I heard you dumped what's-her-face in the Counsel's Office. Too bad. You could use her help if Furlong ever gets tired of swinging his dick around. Or, are you going to call her? How long has it been since you robo-dialed her?"

He doesn't move, doesn't turn to look at her. He doesn't seem surprised to hear her voice, either. "Five weeks. No, seven. Maybe? What day is it?"

"Jesus, Dan."

"What's it like up there in the land of the living, anyway? Is POTUS still the President?"

The little knot of worry that was starting to form dissolves. He might be wandering alone in the wilderness but he's not _that_ far gone.

"Ha ha."

"Yeah, I worked really hard on that one," he says, but the usual heat is missing from his voice.

"It shows."

With some effort, Dan pulls himself back together a little bit and turns to face her. "Is this why you called me forty-seven times yesterday and hung up on me when I finally called you back?"

What she wants to say mostly involves punching him in his stupid smirking mouth but she settles for:

"Kind of. I have an idea."

"Oh, wow, okay. Hold on, let me call the Capitol Police and get the ball rolling. We'll get a parade together...."

"Great!" She claps and shifts her weight. "Since we've got that all taken care of, good luck with the whole, uh, cave troll thing you got going on down here. See you on C-SPAN!"

She doesn't even make it to the door before he's grabbing the back of her sleeve and pulling her back into the closet that passes for his new office.

"I'm sorry, Amy. Okay, look, just... Come here, sit down. I'm sorry. I, uh, haven't—obviously—quite adjusted to my new, uh..."

"Don't give yourself an aneurysm trying to be a nice guy, Dandroid. I know better."

It's amazing. She can actually _see_ his protective shell coming back up. But she's learned a trick or two. Before he can get himself completely under control, she needs to knock his legs out from under him again.

A quick fumble in her pocket and she slaps a small box down on the desk. The metal vibrates with a dull ring, a low hollow noise muffled by all the paper that still manages to set her teeth on edge.

Dan actually, _physically_ , recoils. She thinks he might even pale a bit, under the oh-so-subtle fake tan and the for-once totally artless anxiety stubble.

"What is that?" he says in a tone of voice normally reserved for nuclear waste and yeast infection creams.

"That's yours, Danny Boy. This is mine."

Amy wiggles her finger at him for a second before she realizes the stones are turned the wrong way. When she twists the band, the diamond catches the light and something slides across Dan's face so fast she almost misses it. Her stomach doesn't, though. It does a little flip in response. Just a little one. Hardly noticeable. Just a totally involuntary, purely physiological reaction. Something she ate, maybe. It's not excitement or anything. It's completely unrelated to the way certain parts of her head and her heart flicker back to life when his nostrils flare and his lips tighten and he stares into her eyes like....

Yeah, so, indigestion. That's all. That fucking pasta.

Dan clears his throat and still manages to sound like he's choking. "I thought you took care of this."

"Huh. Funny story: I _tried_ , but it turns out it's really hard to do that when someone refuses to answer your calls for a year and never opens his mail."

"I moved."

"And they sent the papers to your new apartment, Dan. All of your new apartments. And when I ran out of money to pay them, they stopped trying, all right? Don't pull this shit with me. I'm not in the mood."

The tiny box looks tinier still once it's in his hand. He strokes his thumb down the seam and digs the nail in like he's going to pop it open, then drops it like it's burning his skin.

"Fine, okay. Whatever, we'll table that," he says, like it's his call. "Sorry. What's the plan? I'm in some pretty deep fucking shit here and you're not doing so hot right now either, Mimi. How are you going to fix this one?"

Well, the first thing she's going to do is figure out how to keep her throat from closing up when he uses her old nickname.

\--

Once upon a time, Amy believed in happily-ever-afters. Handsome princes who would sweep you off your feet and love you until the end of time. By the time she hit college, she knew that she was perfectly capable of doing the sweeping herself. Or going without it altogether, if that was what she felt like doing. Happily-ever-after was an illusion.

She wasn't stupid; she knew it existed for some people. Some people met and fell in love and married or moved in together and acquired dogs and babies and cars and houses and lived in contentment. But for Amy, happiness at all took hard work—lots of it—and she did enough of that _at_ work.

Then she met Dan. He was the brand-new legislative correspondent for a no-name freshman from Kentucky, the first of his many jumps up and up and up. He wasn't much to look at, she thought when they met. Skinny and practically vibrating with ambition, with comb marks in his gelled hair, careful close shaves and neatly pressed coats. Interchangeable with a hundred other recently graduated frat boys-turned-aides. But he was persistent, and he could be funny and dorky and sweet when he thought no one was looking. For whatever reason, he decided she was one of the people he wanted to see that side of him.

For a while, anyway.

\--

It's amazing how much more she feels like an idiot at six in the morning. Everything that seemed like a good idea the night before is so obviously, patently juvenile and puerile and asinine in the morning light.

But what other option does she have? This isn't just the bed she made. "I mean, this is the bed I lay down in while it was on fire."

As she weaves through the early traffic, she keeps up a running litany of inanities and idle complaints, just enough to fill the empty space in the car with words that don't really mean anything. She's checking to see if she's got enough time to shoot through the intersection before the light changes when Dan turns away with a grin he obviously doesn't want her to see.

"It's times like this that it comes back to me in excruciating detail that you were a theater kid in high school."

"Fuck you."

"No, thank you, dear. I have a headache."

"We can't just wing it, Dan. This isn't a— a press release for JobsBaltimore. We need to have a plan."

"You're just going to call Janet up and tell her, 'Oh, hey, I kind of forgot to mention that I was just kidding the other day'? I mean, you have to clear up that 'he can't' bullshit, no matter what you do about this whole—"

When he flaps his hand between them with a totally inarticulate sputter, his ring fucking _glitters_ in the weak sunlight like they're starring in some bedazzled made-for-tv movie. Jesus Christ. It would be too early for this shit if it were eleven o'clock at night. As it is, she just rolled out of bed half an hour ago, her macchiato tastes like battery acid, and Dan looks and smells so good in the close confines of her SUV that she wants to drag him over the back of their seats and pick up where they left off six years ago.

(All right, three years ago if you count the convention, which she totally does not.

And just shut up about Hurricane Sandy.)

"I'm serious, Mimi. I can't have it going around that I can't get it up. You gotta walk it back."

Okay, he really needs to lay off the nickname. He hasn't called her that in years and now twice in two days. She's going to puke on his coat before they even get to Dupont, at this rate.. This is not a conversation she needs to have right now. Or ever? Preferably never. "Oh, for God's sake."

"I've got a reputation to maintain. You know, even if I can't, uh...."

"Get it up?"

"Take full advantage of my reputation while we're doing this," he finishes, talking over her. He takes a long drink of his coffee and squints out the window at a group of tourists gawking at a coffee shop awning. "I don't do overlap, Amy. You know that."

Well, actually, she doesn't. But she knows how much his power-grabs mean to him, and she knows he'd rather gnaw off his own testicles than jeopardize his career. Intentionally, anyway.

She opts to fall back to their argument and leave that particular ticking time bomb lying where it landed.

"Okay, so I'm going to call Janet and tell her I'm a huge liar. That's a fantastic plan, Dan. That's exactly what I'm going to do. Or, ooh, maybe I'll get some new cards printed up and do it that way. 'Dear esteemed member of the press, just as you expected, almost nothing that comes out of my mouth is in any way related to the truth. Ask me how!'"

His eyeroll is probably visible from space.


End file.
